Recently, Li Yi, the founder and CEO of 51WORLD, was invited to attend the Unreal Fest Shanghai 2024 conference, where he delivered a captivating keynote speech titled “Co-creating and Sharing the Earth Clone Project.”

Li Yi highlighted the 3D+AI technology that 51WORLD has been developing for years, which can generate any region of the globe within a minute. He expressed his hope to open up more core technologies and ecosystems to attract more people to co-create and share in the Earth Clone Project, pioneering a new paradigm for 3D+AI.

Since its inception, 51WORLD has been driven by the vision of creating a real, complete, and permanent “Digital Twin Earth,” aiming to make the real world more efficient, secure, and comfortable to live in. This vision is set to be realized in five stages over 16 years (2015–2030), with the aim of solving various complex issues in the real world..

From early VR house viewing to later smart parks, smart cities, smart factories, and autonomous driving simulations, after nearly a decade of technological development and business exploration, 51WORLD has officially entered the fourth phase of Earth Clone — the Fully Simulated World. In March of this year, we released the key platform and carrier for the Earth Clone Project — 51Earth. At the same time, the promotional video for 51Earth was also unveiled on Bilibili(a top video-sharing platform in China), quickly surpassing 1 million views and attracting widespread attention from both inside and outside the industry.

Li Yi, the founder of 51WORLD, keenly recognized in the early stages of entrepreneurship that real-time 3D would become the most effective mode of information interaction after text, images, and video. However, the current 3D content creation faces many challenges, including high costs and low efficiency.

To accelerate the industry breakthrough from 2D to 3D, 51Earth integrates AI technology to greatly simplify the 3D content creation process, allowing developers and creators to easily produce high-quality 3D videos and interactive content. It is committed to reducing the cost of 3D content creation by 90%, which can be widely applied in fields such as virtual exploration, game production, video creativity, urban planning, and AI training. To further enhance the platform’s openness, Li Yi revealed in his speech that 51Earth will gradually launch products and toolchains, linking 2D maps represented by OSM and 3D engines represented by Unreal Engine, to build an open cyclical ecosystem of data, assets, and applications.

At the presentation, Li Yi showcased the upcoming 51Earth AI features, which left a deep impression on the audience with their cuttinng-edge performance and minimalist operation in automated 3D scene generation, real-time editing, and co-creation and sharing:

Generate any area of the Earth in one minute. Select any area less than one square kilometer on 51Earth, and the AI will automatically generate a real-time 3D scene of that area within 1 minute, easily achieving the freedom of 3D map creation.

Edit the five major elements of the Earth in one hour. Support rapid creation and editing of buildings, roads, vegetation, water bodies, and terrain; support real-time editing and generation based on semantic data.

Import global 3D assets into UE in one stop. 51Earth comes with a built-in global high-precision spatial data and a vast library of model assets, providing low-threshold editing tools. It is currently compatible with mainstream platforms such as UE and WDP, and will support more engines for secondary development in the future to help developers and creators achieve a one-stop operation from data selection to 3D asset generation, 3D asset editing, and secondary development.

The official version will be released at the 7th Earth Clone Project Conference! On December 5th, in “Green City” Nanning, we look forward to seeing you there!